


Aftermath

by piggy09



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, Time Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:14:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24430390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: Ninety-three days before Lazuli’s death, and sixty-four days before Lazuli’s death, and thirty-four days before Lazuli’s death, Lazuli sits down to tea with her brother.
Relationships: Lazuli Rocks & Amethar Rocks
Comments: 36
Kudos: 85





	Aftermath

**Author's Note:**

> Just...thinkin about time stuff. It's the Homestuck in me.

Ninety-three days before Lazuli’s death, and sixty-four days before Lazuli’s death, and thirty-four days before Lazuli’s death, Lazuli sits down to tea with her brother. Her brother. Down to tea with. Lazuli sits down to tea with her brother – the tea is oversteeped, because of the problems the cook is/was having, and that isn’t something to meddle with, it’s just another strand of the web that is pulsing at Lazuli’s temples. She takes a biscuit from the bowl in the center of the table. (Ninety-one days.) She puts the biscuit back. (Ninety-three.)

“Lazuli,” Amethar says. “Do you know if we’ll win this war?”

Amethar: young, but not as young as he was when he was young. Marriage will soften him. It has not softened him, because he has not yet met the wife who is going to soften him. The space by his eyes where crow’s feet should be is so jarringly unsplintered; she loves him. She loves him now and she loves him when he dies and when she dies, and is dead, and he loves her: she loves him.

“That isn’t really how magic works.” (A lie.) (Ninety-four days.)

“That’s bullshit.” An echo of Amethar says _yeah, alright, fair_ and then splinters into sugardust and is gone. Seven thousand one hundred and twenty-three days from now, Ruby Rocks draws her bow. Her mouth is set in a determined frown. Amethar’s mouth is set in a determined frown. Now. In the now. The now. Now.

“I won’t lie, that was some bullshit.” She really wants a biscuit. Ninety-one days is really not that many fewer than ninety-two, or ninety-three, and when she dies she will have already died – but the hot seasick headache of it all. Alright. “If I tell you what will happen – or what may happen – or what might have already happened, I’m essentially throwing the probability of these outcomes completely to chance. Your path forward will change depending on my answer. If I tell you that we win you might grow overconfident and doom us to failure. If I tell you that we lose you might impulsively charter a ship and run away to the Dairy Islands and therefore not die on the battlefield, here, in Candia. I can’t make any concrete promises. Would you like me to tell you that we’re going to win – without the weight of prophecy behind the statement, only the words? Would that mean anything? I wouldn’t be confirming or denying but if you need the emotional support I’m happy to give it.”

“No, I don’t need the support.” Amethar tilts his head to look at her. She sees his daughters down in the pit of his eyes. “You alright?”

“Yes.” Ruby is dying. No she isn’t. Yes she is. She isn’t even born, but she’s already dying. Amethar is looking right at her.

“You’re looking a little stale. I don’t care what the fates say or whatever, it’s not your job to win this whole war on your own. Okay?”

The splatter of blood on her chest.

“Eat a biscuit, Lazuli. Come on. You’re gonna starve.”

Her brother is holding out a biscuit in the palm of his hand. Ruby’s hand is so small in it, the palm of his hand. Lifeline, lifeline. And Amethar at age six. And Amethar at age forty-seven. And Lazuli, with ninety-four days. It seemed like a bigger number a moment ago. Now it doesn’t seem like anything.

 _I want to meet my nieces_ , says an echo of Lazuli.

She takes the biscuit. She bites into it. It tastes like the way it has already tasted, which is to say it tastes exactly like a biscuit.

 _What?_ says an echo of Amethar.

 _Never mind_ , says Lazuli. _I forgot when I was._

“There you go,” Amethar says. “Aren’t you supposed to have that – that guy, that bear guy, Teddy.”

“Theobald.”

“Yeah, that.”

Theobald Gumbar. If she makes it to his sixteenth lesson, it is possible that he will save her brother’s life.

“I’ve set him to work summoning a familiar,” she says.

“Laz, that’s not what he’s for. He’s supposed to take care of you.”

“He is. Will be. He already has. It’s fine, it’s settled.” She will bite into the biscuit. She bites into the biscuit. She has bitten into the biscuit. Her head hurts, but it isn’t like she didn’t know it was coming.

“I’m gonna talk to him,” Amethar mutters darkly.

“You already did, it won’t accomplish anything.”

“Okay, stop – that’s confusing, don’t. I did not already talk to him. You saw me talk to him in, like, a potential future. Not the same thing.”

“Basically the same thing.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Yuh-huh.”

“You’re so annoying,” Amethar says. “Man, all of my sisters suck so bad.” A smile at the corner of his mouth. Obviously he does not mean it. The second the light leaves Rococoa’s eyes, Amethar will howl at a screaming furious pitch that ignites the battlefield around him. He will be crying. Lazuli won’t be looking; she won’t see it, she’s already seen it.

“A strange and fascinating coincidence,” Lazuli says. “My brother also sucks. Bad. He badly sucks.” She’s smiling too. It doesn’t accomplish anything.

Amethar sticks his tongue out at her. Lazuli’s little brother. Memory, rememory: seven years old, in the time before magic, watching herself watch herself watch herself playing with her siblings in the courtyard. Peanut butter mud all up her stockings. Peanut butter mud all up her stockings, Sour Scratch trembling in her hands, Rococoa’s blood in the brown dirt, Amethar howling, Amethar gap-toothed and shoving mud into her hair. _I miss you_ , she tells him, she’s told him, she’ll tell him, she doesn’t. She won’t.

“I miss you,” she tells him, or maybe _I miss you_. “Did I say that already?”

“No, you didn’t. Eat another biscuit.” She eats another biscuit, which tastes like an echo of the memory of the biscuit she’ll eat after this one.

“Once all this war stuff is over,” Amethar says, “we’ll hang out more. Rococoa can do all that queen stuff. We’ll take a spa day.”

They do. They will. Only it’s in ninety-seven days so they won’t. Dust.

“Yes,” she says. “I would like that. When I have time. If I have time. Hm. I already have time, it’s free time that I want. Free time.”

“Cool,” Amethar says. “You promise me, right? You. Me. Cucumber cola. Those dark chocolate mud baths.”

“I promise,” Lazuli tells him. She looks away from him to look at him, next to her and across from her in the mud bath. Lazuli looks back at Lazuli. _I don’t want to die_ , she tells herself.

She tells herself. She warns herself, she lectures herself, she listens to herself. She is here, sitting at this table, but also she is on the battlefield and she is seven years old in the dirt and she is fifteen in front of a shattered mirror and she is in her study and in the monastery and sitting in the mud bath, feeling the mud bath unmake itself as the future remembers that she cannot exist in it; she is casting Shield, she is bringing down arcane arrows, she is catching her life’s blood in her hands. _I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want—_

Unfortunately, she is already dead.

Lazuli remembers this and watches Lazuli remember this and look towards Amethar – once – desperately – before she crumbles (like everything does) into sugar and dust.

**Author's Note:**

> And I wasn't going anywhere fast, and my sister said she'd seen the end of the path  
> The direction that I fly, straight through the eye of our aftermath  
> \--"Our Aftermath," PhemieC
> 
> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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